Israel-Gaza War Fundraiser for Disability Families

Israel’s ongoing security situation and this horrific war in particular are continuing to impact each of our employees and beneficiaries in some way. 

Basic Needs

For the first two and a half months, your donations went toward supplying physical therapy equipment, communication and assistive technology, food, medicine, and toiletries to our beneficiaries with disabilities Ashkelon, many who could not leave their home and live below the poverty line.

Home Visits

Due to the lengthy closing of our centers in Ashkelon, we also began sending our staff to each child’s and adult with disabilities’ home every week to activate their bodies and minds with their personally prescribed therapies. At these visits, they were discovering very frightened children and adults alike, due the threatening noises and reverberations of the sirens, Hamas rockets, and IDF bombs from nearby Gaza.

Partial Reopening

As of mid-December, the Ashkelon centers began to reopen for small groups with children alternating days.Our Ashkelon early childhood rehabilitative daycare centers operate in four modified private homes with no wheelchair access, lots of stairs, and only one small protected area. The shelters are not large enough for all the children and staff, which is why our beneficiaries are limited to coming in shifts. In normal times, the children stay until 3pm. Now, the day is very short since the children must go home before their morning nap. This is out of concern that if the siren sounds, it will be too difficult and possibly traumatic to move the children into the safe room as they sleep. (When we build our two large centers, the safe rooms there will be the nap rooms, holding all the children and staff.)

A Safe Room for our Modi’in Children

The Chimes Israel Early Childhood Rehabilitative Center and Kindergarten in Modi’in-Maccabim-Reut quickly reopened during the war. However, the Inspector General at the Modi’in Home Command would not let us operate in our old yet renovated building without safe room. In order to protect the children and employees from rocket fire during this war, we had to move the entire contents of the preschool for 34 children to a squalid, run-down temporary space. Because the space did not have kitchen facilities, we also had to employ a catering service to feed the children breakfast, lunch and snacks. We moved our services back to our building in late December 2023. However, we are using your donations to this fund to build a safe room for this facility to protect our children for the next war or emergency.

Resilience Training

With the reality of only a 15-second evacuation time, the workers in Ashkelon tell us that every security escalation causes floods of anxiety. This is because they know that they will not be able to evacuate within 15 seconds and not everyone will be able to fit into the shelter. Even in routine situations, when there is something suggestion of an emergency, we see ongoing anxiety.

For example, two weeks after the last military operation, we held a routine emergency exercise drill where an aide had a panic attack and was unable to return to functionality that day. At another time, reacting to the loud sound of an airplane's ultrasonic boom, a different employee was frightened, fainted, and was taken to the hospital.

We are now using your generous donations to provide our staff with Resilience Training to achieve "Team Resilience" to help our employees improve interpersonal communication, engage in better techniques for coping with stress, and better manage security vulnerabilities and crisis situations.

To give you an example of the power of these workshops, one of our employees at our Ashkelon centers lives in the Gaza envelope and survived the October 7th massacre. She recalled the power of her previous resilience training to enable her to focus on survival instead of fear. “The infiltration of the terrorists and the noise of the gunshots caused my body to stop breathing. Then I remembered that in the resilience workshop we learned about breathing and how to lower the pressure as much as possible.”